Take your pick: a radio chief or half a Davina

It's the simplest yowl going. BBC bosses pay themselves fat bonuses in a year when 4,000 ordinary staffers wait for their redundancy notices. Where's the justice in that? A question union general secretaries ask automatically. But let's pose it another way around.

Is the director-general of the BBC (total 2005 salary, £459,000) worth less than Kirsty Young reading the Channel 5 News - and less than half Paul Dacre's take at the Daily Mail? Is the chief operating officer of a £3bn corporation worth less than the nice lady who reads the 10 o'clock News - or the head of all radio and music worth half Davina McCall's summer contract for Big Brother

Newspapers generally avoid total wage scale contortions. The editor usually sits top of a pay heap where only a few star columnists leave him or her behind. (Ah! Mr Littlejohn, I presume.) But then, newspapers aren't wholly in showbusiness - or prone to top-job hopping between C4 and the Beeb.

Do unions complain about a Wogan/Paxman/Humphrys pay scale? No: it gives them a target to aim for. But men and women in suits on executive boards have a much rougher ride, as we saw last week when the BBC annual report came up with the figures. Thirty per cent bonuses for what?

Editors ought to steer clear of most bonus schemes because they reward them for saving cash, for buying in cheap material, for not covering the news all guns blazing, for not doing their essential job - while group finance directors et al have a quite different set of imperatives.

To that extent, it's good news that 30 per cent is about to become 10 per cent. But everybody in BBC command, from Michael Grade down, ought to keep transparency and justification high on their agenda.

It's our licence fee money, after all, not advertising earnings: and when new D-G Mark Thompson chose to waive his first-year bonus because of all those redundancies, he clearly signalled that, close up and personal, something was wrong. Basic rule of heavily bruised thumb: if you can't defend it, don't do it.

Can Deedes speak louder than losses?

Pre-bombing sales figures for June were mundane, going on grim. ABC winners, compared with June 2004, are in short supply: the Times (up 3.35 per cent) and the Independent and Scotsman (pretty much where they were). Three new compacts making their case. After that it's gloom all the way.

Total national daily sales are down 2.57 per cent with the Mirror down 4.99 per cent, the Guardian down 6.99 per cent and the Express (sans bulks, sans everything) at minus 6.75 per cent. Sundays see the Star a whopping 15.89 per cent lower, with the People (minus 9.05 per cent) and the Express (minus 7.04 per cent) puffing along behind.

Some of this may, to be sure, be affected by the post-election mini-balloon of political interest going pop. Some of it awaits work in progress, like the Guardian's approaching switch to Berliner size. But you have to be exceptionally brave to risk a new launch in such circumstances.

Ah! Here comes the exceptionally brave Jeremy Deedes of the Telegraph, now fronting the Sportsman, a come-next-spring daily for people who like a bet. Last month, if it's relevant, the Racing Post had lost 4.31 per cent of circulation and Football First was down 30 per cent, so sport on newsprint isn't a racing cert.

Online is different (and important to Mr Deedes) but what are the odds on paper success? Say 5-2, and counting.